Either way, here's what I've been working on since arriving in Banff on Tuesday, in between visits with Myrna Kostash, Greg Hollingshead, Laura Farina, Tim Bowling, Shelley Leedhal and Steve Ross Smith;

The Banff Sessions

a lovers place is often ambiguous

darkness like trees, smell a mountain failurebatch, how much

not of hunger but of heart, a traumapaper-thin weight

is not enough of me blood in pages youbare lifted hands another

note in pencil shipwreck, there you plied a written, why you different I am

one spring day fundamental arguments,through telephone disguise

falls out, pushes love

, you first

what your argument needed here these mountains

a lovers place is architecture, crows, what that thing I said the wind, or string the valley bowtectonic plate a kitchen overlooks

same speech, a karaoke dogwas home for wayward girls

her purple thin a hand clip snowor south a rapture

rocky mountain park

drawn spartan hood, do airplane then

slip of siding 29, a sulpher slide on rock,debate or die the body muscle feeds &

break you tell me; hand in you my tongue

import swim mountain guides

the backdrop miss all I shall, shall begin with failureletter-made, a pact made hollow

When Daniel Poliquin talked on Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter(1976), he talked about the idea of greatness, and, as a kid, about reading the Illustrated Classicsversions of Les Miserablesand MacBeth. He gave a magnificent talk on the rigors of being an artist in Canada, and how we couldn’t be snobbish in Canada about art, given how "we are all the same here, we have to fight the same snow and the same mosquitoes." He talked about how great works "entice you to write better," and about how Canadians have managed an advantage of being able to write "durable works" (he gave the foreign example of the story of Pinocchio as a durable work by an "unknown" author) while at the same time, remaining completely unknown.

I remember filling a pad of paper with page after page of scribbled script that went from right to left across each of the writing pad’s miniature pages. I might have been five or six. I finished the book in about five minutes and, if I remember correctly, was quite pleased with its reception.

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I still feel new to Ottawa though I’ve been here for about seven years. I had a repeated dream during my first months in Fredericton, New Brunswick where I had moved to attend university. In the dream, my eyes were level with a seam. Above the seam, all was blue. Below the seam, all was yellow. It took me a while to realize that the dream was of a horizon, something in my mind was yearning for those clear prairie sightlines rather than the Eastern Canadian patch of blue floating amongst the mapletrees.

I grew up in the prairies, in a small town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by soontobe ghost towns as the rail spurlines closed. I guess that desolation, that neglect, prepared me for poetry.

If you are translating geography from Greek as earth+writing rather than a field of science, than, yes, geography is important, without it, my work, any work, is groundless. But my writing and reading and travelling bump into the question: what would a North American earthwriting actually look like? Much of our writing seems so homesick, hearkening for an imagined Europe, the Greeks, a homeland that is elsewhere.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

My poems barely begin and rarely seem to end but shade themselves in and out of everyday life. In all ways, taking the time to sit, work on a poem that few will read, meddle with its fine inefficiencies, seems like an act of counter (that is, unproductive) culture. Books, projects, and poems seem to coagulate out of that mess. Poems, for me, begin and end everywhere.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Oral performance is an integral part of poetry, it is hard to imagine poetry or much good writing at all, without oral performance – only in some concrete poetry and government briefs is it unimportant. I think public readings are also a vital part of making and maintaining community. We few gather to listen, to kibitz, to admire, to complain, and to communicate. Poetry readings are a gathering of the freaks (myself included) in a culture (or should we use “economy” in place of what culture once was) that could go on fine without us and barely tolerates us.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am a pragmatist. I use what I find useful but don’t feel the need for theoretical fundamentalism (that is, as in any type of fundamentalism, blindness). I think theory concerns that mean anything to anybody are human concerns: how can I understand what is happening around me (looking). I would say that I follow a stray dog poetics, if I can use such a term for my mutt conglomeration of impulses. This is a poetics, a theory of composition, built on lightness, wander, wonder, hope, anger, inquisitiveness, love, hunger, lust.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I can’t say that I have worked with many outside editors, mostly inside editors.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

The process of making three books has made me much more aware of the limitations of book making and the limitations of my own approach to putting poems into books. I would say that it has made me think much more about how books function for me personally and my craft but also in the culture. Bookmaking and publishing is harder, perhaps, once you have finally blown off the illusions and realize that books = something few will buy and even fewer will read.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Mon père!?

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Know how to drink, how to dance, some names to call the stars.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to reviews/critical work)? What do you see as the appeal?

I left academics (that is, going on to do a doctorate) because I loved doing critical work too much, to the point that it was taking me away from writing poetry. I have also given up most of my review writing (I used to do quite a bit) as I find it hard to fit in with a full time job, reading, living and writing. There is the ability to chase down an idea in critical writing that I miss and that has leaked back into some of my writing practice.

There is such a breakdown of boundaries between prose and poetry anymore (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the “true” novelists and poets) that it is hard to say if there are separate genres anymore. I find writing on the cusp most interesting.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Nobody needs to know this much information. Suffice to say I sleep, I wake, I eat, I walk, I fuck, listen, and talk. I make room for thought.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My writing has never been stalled. Perhaps what you are calling “stalled” is actually “doubt”? Work with doubt.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

With the publication of another book, each of the books before seem to have been written by a naive and youthful idiot.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

These two phrases don’t belong in one question for me. Outside of my writing is the life I need to actually be able to write – I work with the federal government on domestic HIV/AIDS issues (I have been working in HIV/AIDS in Canada at the local and national level for over ten years now). This is interesting work for which I am well paid as opposed to poetry, which is more interesting but much less well paid. Other things and writers that are important to my work right now are a multitude (cf above) that I fear to numerate.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Everything.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Inspector General of Rabbits and Chickens in Public Markets

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I have no idea. Terrible decision making? Lack of parental guidance?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

As I’ve been travelling for the last three months in South America, I haven’t seen many films as most of what is available there is Hollywood in translation. One thing that I did see recently, though, amazed me. In the city of Cordoba (the third largest city in Argentina, with about 1.5 million people) there are three or four private and public art galleries that showcase Argentine and Cordobaen modern and contemporary art. These are some of the best art galleries I have ever seen and some of the best presented art I have ever seen. It speaks to a collective wisdom, both a pride in local and regional art but also a desire to have art as part of the city’s overall vital infrastructure (these galleries are partially or completely supported by public money), that I have seen in few other places. It is exhilarating to see art taken so seriously by a population and its politicians as opposed to many other places where arts funding and infrastructure is seen not as a vital component to living but more as a type of social welfare for the freaks who can’t make it in business.

Edmonton AB: The second chapbook out from Trisia Eddy’s red nettle press is Jenna Butler’s [see her 12 or 20 questions here] own Weather (Edmonton AB: red nettle press, 2008), produced in a lovely edition of one hundred copies. Butler is one of the more interesting young poets coming out of Edmonton over the past few years, through her use of sharp, short lines in longer sequences, and even (finally) has a first trade book coming out soon with NeWest Press. Here’s the first part of the new sequence, Weather:

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Just how Edmonton became structured as a mall town is something I’ve been wondering about for years. Sitting at the Garneau Pub on 109th Street, I find two paragraphs in Linda Goyette and Carolina Jakeway Roemmich’s Edmonton In Our Own Words(2004) that explain a bit of the car/mall culture of the city of Edmonton. They talk about the creation of the interiority of the infamous West Edmonton Mall in the late 1970s, and the shifts in the construction of city that the mall might not have created, but was simply a part of.

Huge shopping malls were the consequence of rapid suburban growth in post-war Edmonton, not the cause of it. More than half of Edmonton’s residents lived in suburban neighbourhoods. Long before the Ghermezians arrived in town, Edmontonians had embraced Westmount Shopping Park, one of Canada’s first prototype shopping malls, and Southgate Mall, the largest mall west of Toronto when it opened in 1970. The city redesigned itself to serve drivers and their cars, not pedestrians or bus passengers. Public transit did not keep up with suburban growth. Suburban residents became impatient with Edmonton’s limited public transit to their neighbourhoods, not to mention winter waits at outdoor bus stops. They preferred to drive across a wide city to indoor shopping malls where they could park for free.

If you’ve never been here, you have to realize just how much the city is built for strip malls; strip malls, porn shops and liquor stores. There are far more here than in any other city I’ve been in the country; I’m still trying to figure out why that is. What makes a city? Is it population, construction (whether deliberate planning or accidents of movement), finances, cultural concerns, or all (or even none) of the above? Thinking, too, since Ontario was a creation of the Scots (and their dour moralism), it’s pretty much the only province you can’t purchase alcohol either in a convenience store or at the back of the bar to take home with you; what makes one geography have an idea and not another?

There is something about being in Edmonton that requires at least one visit to West Edmonton Mall. Mid-November, Lainna and I spent part of a Saturday wandering the Mall and watching roller coaster rides, the old-timey pioneer photo kiosk, the wavepool and skating rink; catching the movements and the human traffic and the coloured lights. As Alice Major suggested in an email, interesting for “how little use it makes of the traditional western décor or symbol. It tries to recreate Bourbon Street and beaches—places far away from here—not rodeos and wranglers.” I hadn’t been there in nine years, since the ottawa international writers festival’s Great Canadian Via Rail Tour back in 1998 with Sean Wilson, Kira Harris, David McGimpsey and Susan Musgrave, and going through as only tourists do—looking at everything, including participating in the shooting range, bowling alley and roller coaster—and buying (almost) nothing.

Years later, going through Elizabeth Smart’s journals [see my previous note on her here] from her own year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University, I listen to the anger that comes out in her voice. Why did she hate her experience so much? I mean, apart from the fact that her youngest child, Rose, had died of an overdose six months earlier; is she complaining about the provincialism of the city or using that as her target, unable to process Rose any other way? How does (or even, can) one process the death of a child? Here is part of her entry for September 12, 1982:

To think! I was going to enrich their lives & I find myself poverty-stricken. A desert within, a desert without. Needing them—if only they’d take pity on—where can I find it—where is it hiding—the passion & the life.

It stands to reason, there must be a pulsing human life somewhere, here as elsewhere, there must be. Does it take place in their homes—visiting back & forth, tiny exchanges, boring each other for a purpose?

O where for me shall my salvation come, from whence arise?

Twenty seven years beyond her, I can look into this passage and see shades of familiarity but I do not feel her obvious grief. Kind acquaintance? Am I simply too naïve, too polite (too “Canadian,” perhaps) and can see nothing else? Or is the difference itself in the city, the provincial aspect of Edmonton in the 1980s, highlighting the severe shifts from her many years in England and Ireland? How different this passage reads from her By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, despite being another book rife with heartbreak and disappointment. For Elizabeth Smart and Edmonton, there was certainly no love, or love lost. She might not have had anything left.

I can’t imagine she would have had any reason to go even near the mall, then bare a year old; the stories still float through the English department of her time here, unhappy, unkempt and worn out from drink. I only wish that more of her journals from this period were put into print; or was it simply more of the same? So much of the mall is certainly circus sideshow, yet so much is simply the same as almost any other mall, but one that continues, on and on with each turn of a hallway. With most of its space taken up on two levels, there are smaller malls that have spaces that seem much larger; the mirrored ceiling in the food court that allows the illusion of space, despite the lower ceilings.

West Edmonton Mall opened September 15, 1981, expanding further with three more phases of construction in 1983, 1985 and 1998. The mall was officially the largest shopping mall in the world until 2004, when the Jin Yuan, or Golden Resources Shopping Mall, also known as the “Great Mall of China” in Beijing, with over a thousand stores and a total area of 680,000 square metres. West Edmonton Mall might still be the largest in North America, but the current largest, constructed in 2005, is the South China Mall in Dongguan, with 1500 stores and a total area of 892,000 square metres. Edmonton’s almost seems puny in comparison, with only eight hundred stores, and a total area of 570,000 square metres.

Why did it take nearly a decade to get someone to take me back to the mall? In 2001, suggesting the same to a group of friends on Whyte Avenue, grad students at the University including poets Adam Dickinson and Andy Weaver, they looked at me and my obvious lack of better judgment without saying a word. I mean, how could I?

Nine years since I had wandered the mall, where we went bowling and for Budweisers (when in Rome, as they say) at the Hooters, simply because we thought it was funny (I think Canadians are far too subtle for Hooters, a family restaurant in the southern United States; over the past decade, three have opened and closed in Ottawa in quick succession). I won’t tell which author (I was told later) screamed like a little girl during that ’98 trip on the roller coaster. Edmonton in 1998, where we arrived by train, and somehow our hotel was out by the airport. At breakfast, seeing the sign that told of the daily special, eggnog paralyzers, preparing for the Christmas rush, perhaps? What, we asked, is in an eggnog paralyzer? The waiter slowly checked his 11am watch, looked at us disparagingly, and told us it was exactly what was in a regular paralyzer, except with eggnog. As though every school-child in Alberta had already been taught what we had yet to learn.

Even before I arrived, I knew: there is the mythological Alberta, and, even, the mythological Edmonton, holding on still to the myths of frontier. Robert Kroetsch wrote wild horses set loose over the High Level Bridge in What the Crow Said(1978), and wrote about the land he grew up on near Leduc in his first collection, his “Stone Hammer Poem” that now opens up Completed Field Notes (2002); the land his father and his grandfather owned; the land near where Alberta first struck oil, writing:

This paperweight on my desk

where I beganthis poem was

found in a wheatfieldlost (this hammer,this poem).

Cut to a function,this stone was(the hand is gone ―

There are the neighbourhoods, and then the city itself. In Strathcona, it’s still a walking neighbourhood, but no where else in Edmonton, it seems. What Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (later, first Baron Strathcona) saw when he train travelled west, creating hotels and neighbourhoods in the wake of his rail. A section of what became Vancouver was built speculatively, waiting for what the advent of rail would bring; they say, for every mile of track, a dead Chinese labourer. Just what are these legacies built on? The Rideau Canal back in Ottawa, built on the blood and the bones of the Irish and French, brought in for the work and then abandoned, when work finally finished.

Former Edmonton resident George Melnyk, long moved to Calgary, also talked about the differences in Alberta of the provincial mythologies against those of the two major cities from his New Moon at Batoche(2000), writing:

My western Canadian identity has come to me through city life. I’m used to concrete towers, brick buildings, asphalt streets with long rows of houses, traffic jams and crowded malls. I’m not the only one. This is the way the majority of Westerners see the region every single day and yet that experience is viewed as incompatible with the agrarian myth of the region. The experience of city life from childhood to adulthood has moulded millions of Western Canadians but it is considered inauthentic compared to the genuineness of rural existence. The continuing self-image of the region is one of endless prairie fields or grasslands with their icons of farmers and cowboys holding us in its sway. The reason for this is obvious. The wheat farmer and cattle rancher are icons because they reflect the distinguishing feature of the region—its prairie geography and a livelihood tied to it—while the Western Canadian urban reality is viewed as the same as that of other cities. If you want a regional identity you have to take it from the land and not from the city. The land is distinguishing while the city is not.

Later on in the same essay, he writes:

Our culture has set landscape above the city. The city and the land are opposites in which the city is negative and the land is positive. That’s the myth we live by. Historical fact is a little different.[…]Where is Calgary’s mythical archetype? The glorification of the ranching life in the Calgary Stampede is the city’s association with the landscape, not Calgary itself. Edmonton’s archetype is Klondike Days and the heroic trek of gold miners to the Yukon.

But why, over my first Alberta weeks, did I keep returning to Kroetsch, to what I already knew? Why do these myths overshadow, and overtake, even against the weight of such otherwise fact? Editor Srdja Pavlovic encountered the same thing, writing the introduction to Threshold: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing from Alberta(1999):

I first encountered Alberta literature through Seed Catalogue, a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch. The book was a present for my eighteenth birthday from my uncle, a sailor, who had just returned from one of his frequent exotic viaggi across the ocean. At the time, because of my limited English, I was not able to make out much of Kroetsch’s poetry. The verses sounded distant and complicated. But the book sat on my shelf for years and its dream-prints helped me imagine a distant place and wonder about the people living there. I was young and dreamed the symmetry of the world.

The dream-like Alberta, the imaginary Alberta; that urban prairie versus the rural prairie, and how, as far as the European settlers knew it, developed at the same rate. Writing about Alberta literary journals, Linda Goyette titled her piece in the same anthology “Imagining Alberta.” Flipping through pages of the first issue of filling Station magazine from Calgary, she writes:

I begin to wonder about the differences in perception between Alberta’s creative writers and journalists. Both are interpreters of place, but they see, hear, and tell stories differently. What are the poets and short-story writers discovering this year as they sift through life in a harsher province? Do they even live in the same Alberta? Do they like it better?

Further on, she offers an answer to her own speculations, some sort of conclusion:

Journalism is always about now. This imaginative Alberta has a past and a future, not just a present. Ghosts stick around.

There is the Mall, and then there is the myth of the Mall. There is the myth of the Mall imposed on the landscape but nearly invisible, unlike the century before, as railway hotels imposed themselves on the landscape from one coast to the other. As Edmonton poet Alice Major writes in the preface to her collection Tales for an Urban Sky(1999):

Mythologies are large things, continuous across the generations, marrying humanity to the earth and the sky. But it seems to me that myth-making is more local – a magpie impulse that catches sight of glittery things from the corner of its eye and builds them into some home structure. Myth is made up. It makes do with what it finds nearby.

When talking about Alberta or about Edmonton and any kind of deliberate or accidental mythos, why does it always keep coming back to Kroetsch? Why is one and not the other? Writing specifically of Edmonton and the myth-making of the annual July Klondike Days in his book Alberta, he explains that:

The image succeeds because it has a kernel of truth. The father who gets a gold-embroidered vest and a stovepipe hat for Christmas, the teenage boy studying his young beard in the locker room in January, the ladies, after bridge on a bitter February afternoon, looking at patterns and buying warm-coloured cloth by the bolt: they are part of a past that goes back to the erection of Fort Augustus in 1794, to the erection of its rival, Fort Edmonton, in 1795 – and in Alberta that ain’t history, it’s archaeology.

It is as simple as the difference between home and the dream of home? What if it was never your home to begin with? In the Strathcona Public Library, Myrna Kostach [see my previous note on her here and another here] explained the streetcar tracks down 104th Street to me from a photograph on the second floor wall, the days when they ran two-laned, across 82nd Avenue. A series of black and white photographs of historical buildings, and a group of bearded men. Why wouldn’t any of these framed portraits be labeled? Without even a year or address to place them?

Does West Edmonton Mall belong to the dream of Edmonton, the myth of Edmonton, or the harsh reality? It seems to be all of the above; it seems to be all of this and the nightmare too, as most of the local residents I’ve met wouldn’t be caught dead in the building, calling it Maul.

So, in Vegreville, in 1975, I, second-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, socialized Anglo-American, English-French bilingualist, confronted a festival organized from the consciousness of the first generation. I was amazed. It was obvious that the first generation had grown more self-confident, not to say boastful, and was now assuming that the Ukrainian-Canadian “fact” was of interest to all Albertans. No more church basements for them; the festival was held at the exhibition grounds. It was this generation which had erected last summer a monstrous, aluminum pysanka (decorated Easter egg) near the Yellowhead Highway in Vegreville, and dedicated it to the RCMP. (How short their memories are: it was the police who had broken up their hunger marches in the 1930s, closed down their Ukrainian-language concerts, spied on them in their Labour-Farmer Temples.) It was these same people who had scattered throughout Vegreville signs in shop windows saying “Vitayemo,” meaning “Welcome,” and innumerable plastic and china knick-knacks decorated with Ukrainian motifs. They operated concession booths at the festival selling kubassa-on-a-stick and T-shirts emblazoned with “Drink Molson’s Ukrainian” and “Kiss me, I’m Ukrainian.” The message seemed to be that anybody could be a Ukrainian; it was implicit that somebody would want to.

This is not about size, but identifying with a group; still, the marker is certainly there. There is gaudy big and then there is just gaudy; and then there is just big (again, with the associations often with kitch). What is this with our obsession with size?

In March, finding the Mall not big enough for a store from which I might find myself a pork-pie hat (think of Buster Keaton). Maybe had we been in Beijing, I said, which Lainna didn’t appreciate. In the end, it was easier to drive and find all of your stores in one place than to have them all scatterd, and still have to walk. In the end, Lainna and I using the Mall as a whole as a kind of exhibition space, parkland entertainment, taking pictures of the roller coaster I still won’t ride with her, the fake blue whale, the dragon in the movie theatre. Doesn’t it only become a carnival of commerce if you actually buy something?

In every way—although I didn’t realize it at the time. I published it very quickly after starting out as a writer. In retrospect I see that having a book affords all kinds of cultural privilege, as well as giving membership into the world of letters. But then I thought it was simply par for the course. I also had no idea about any of the politics of the writing world in general and of the Canadian poetry scene in particular. There was a pure kind of pleasure to publishing Q&A that sometimes I wish I could get back to.

2 - How long have you lived in St John's, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing?

I don’t live in St. John’s anymore, actually, I live in Toronto. But The Dream Worldis a book that I wrote during the five years we lived in Newfoundland, and it is preoccupied almost entirely with geography (and with the intersection between language and place). I was what is referred to there as a “Come-from-Away,” and so the book looks at what it means to be a stranger in a new environment, both cultural and geographic.

3 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Counter. I’m such a classic introvert, not in the sense that I’m shy, but that I get replenished by time alone and tired out by interaction. So a reading—even worse, a long series of readings—really takes it out of me. On the other hand, it’s incredibly rewarding to meet readers who appreciate the work, and a reading is most often where that happens. I’m getting to enjoy giving readings more, but it’s a skill I’m always trying to cultivate.

4 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

6 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, but it has felt necessary. I’m drawn to both genres, and take pleasure in the similarities as well as the differences. There are poets and novelists (although mostly poets, I think) who contend you can’t do both, at least not with success and/or integrity. To me, though, writing in two genres feels like exercising the same muscle but in different ways. My hope is that one strengthens the other.

7 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

It was threefold: read, read, read.

8 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write first thing in the morning. Ideally I don’t check email until I’ve put in four or five hours. The business end of things I deal with in the afternoons. I don’t take a weekend, not because I’m disciplined, but because I’m miserable without the time to write.

Black coffee is essential.

9 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I stumbled into it. Took a creative writing elective in the final year of my undergraduate degree. Published a couple poems in The New Quarterly(thrilling!). Got a small grant from the OAC. Travelled to St. Peter’s Abbey to attend the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium with Tim Lilburn. Stayed on at St. Pete’s for several months, writing. Got another small grant. Published more poems, and then a book. Etc. I keep waiting for the day when I have to get a day-job, but so far so good.

10 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

It’s better!

Seriously, though. I wrote Question & Answeras a brand new poet with almost no training and with no background in literature whatsoever. I felt my way through it—it was an intuitive, visceral enterprise. The Dream Worldhas not only more life experience but also more poetic training behind it. It’s a tighter book, better edited. I’m very happy with it.

11 – What do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I was thinking of being a therapist. The world is a better place for this not having had happened.

12 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on two things, both big departures for me. The first is a novel set in Prague around the time of the Munich Agreement, in the autumn of 1938. It focuses on the “Kindertransports” that sent Jewish children out of Europe just before the war. My own grandparents came to Canada around that time as well, renounced their Judaism and raised my father and uncle Christian. The second book I’m working on is a book of non-fiction exploring my family’s relationship to religion post-Holocaust, my own accidental discover of my family’s secret in my early teens, and my subsequent exploration of religious and cultural identity.

One of the highlights of the collection (and of the conference itself) had to be Steven Heighton’s piece “On Trying to Wear Al’s Shirts,” that even includes the editors’ note, “Steven Heighton did in fact deliver an earlier version of the following essay while wearing a loud blue polyester shirt that had belonged to Al Purdy.”

How do we come to wear the shirts of mentor poets? Is it a good thing, bad? Is it a gesture of loyalty or a ghoulish appropriation? Or is it neutral—utterly beside the point? I’m going to talk here in an impressionistic, non-syllogistic way about wearing the shirt of an admired older poet while trying to fill it out in my own manner.

The Bowering piece, while managing to work his way through all of the arguments and concerns of his TISH and post-TISH days, managed to distract just long enough to slip in some of the finest commentary on Purdy and Purdy’s work of the whole event, and is worth the price of the collection alone. Being that George Bowering wrote the first little mimeo on Purdy’s work back in 1970, many of the conference participants, whether they wanted to or not, had to reference what he had done (and a number of them really didn’t seem to happy about that). Bowering’s “Purdy among the Tombs” begins:

Al Purdy and I exchanged letters, as they say, for forty years, so of course we had some differences of opinion. The last time I saw him was a week before he died on Good Friday, 2000. It happened that I owed him a letter, so a couple of years later I left one for him on his book-shaped headstone at the bottom end of Purdy Lane in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

I never thought that he’d write back. I should have known. So here I am with another letter I owe him. I am really looking forward to his reply this time.

I was watching a deer lick a salt lick I'd put out by a creek I was living by then. The phone rang, someone said, we want to publish your book. I watched the deer look up to see if she was in any danger. She wasn't. Surprise, joy, fear. It took me out into the world in ways I hadn't anticipated. Most of which have been better, more curious, and tirelessly surprising than I could have imagined.

2 - How long have you lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Since 1985. At first landscape, weather, New England's ways, being new and strong frightened and energized me. So much to see, to consider. To be quiet about. I didn't know how to wear a coat, how to nod in silence. I wanted to live in New England, since I was a kid, watching boats from around the world come up the river past our house south of New Orleans. Why? Because the stories and poems said so. A dead horse might float by on the river. I couldn't tell anyone.

Gender, race, we're dealt. Any gender, any race, we live with what we get, well, with exceptions finely tuned.

I've been asked Who Are You, Where Do You Come From, we're all asked this. Trouble is when asked one can't help but hesitate to think that no matter what one says one will be somehow or other be reduced, pigeon-holed, sometimes stigmatized, other times credited with things which one needn't be credited.

When I knew nothing but south Louisiana, its country, rivers, prairies, swamps, shell roads, New Orleans, little towns, cemeteries, houses on stilts, everyday transport on water, no mountains, no hills, the levee was the main artery next to the river's fierce, sometimes providing, sometimes destructive, ever-present power--these I loved, and wanted to leave to know other places. When I lived in Virginia in the mountains, daily I was surprised that I couldn't see past them. I think I'm a geographical literalist.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Sometimes a poem begins with a sensation, sometimes with a word, sometimes a combination of words, sometimes with a phrase, sometimes with a line, sometimes with a title, sometimes with a tone, sometimes with a sound, sometimes because I'm grieving or pissed or remote or estranged or one with the universe, sometimes because to write a poem is all I want to be doing. I've never started to write a book, never started a book until any book's been underway. Once I realize I'm in a book's midst, I try to forget that I am, fearful of self-consciousness spoiling things. I've always had faith in poetry's powers.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

There have been times when reading in public I've seen a line coming that I knowI wouldn't want to read out loud. I change it as I go and try like hell to seamlessly keep the poem together. I like public readings, for the most part, I'm grateful to any audience that gives poems a chance to register. My favorite public readings are for radio, the sense of intimacy it provides is fairly wonderful. I'm surprised at how casually readings are often treated, room not so hot, acoustics an after-thought, lighting unconsidered, spell broken immediately following with pretzels and beer. But, no, I wouldn't say readings are ever counter-productive. I guess they could be if one lapsed into a routine that's demeaning.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

If there are any theoretical concerns behind, or inside my writing, I try to keep these unknown, ignored, better left unsaid. But I read philosophy, aesthetics, history, science. I've been around for rounds of barrages of language associated with theories. If a theory has at its center something orginally forceful, I enjoy following its logic. I'd never consciously apply any of that logic to something I'm writing within a poem. But I'd be wrong to say what settles in one's mind can be completely ignored.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Not essential, but then I've rarely until recently had the advantage of an involved editor. Matthew Zapruder [see his 12 or 20 questions here], of Wave Books, has been involved in the final determinations of what's in and what's out of my last few books, and that's been helpful. We don't do much, hardly any, line-editing; we do culling and keeping. I would trust him to tell me if a poem could be saved or improved, I would trust him to say something like, you don't want to do that, do you?

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Do you mean putting a book together after its poems are written?

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Yesterday. It was a beauty, a quintessential pear, so fine that a friend who was visiting thought we shouldn't eat it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism/non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I've always written in several genres, though always, by far, have written more poetry. I think a visual artist would have an idea about whether she's working on a sketch, a collage, an oil, a 3 dimensional piece, a film, you know, one has a sense of materials and with that a sense of formal use. I first wrote poetry, and wanted nothing more than to write poetry. Then I wrote journalism to try to figure out a way to make a living while writing poetry. I was never a journalist in any significant way. I wrote stories when the fiction writers around me were whining about how impossible it was to write stories, to see what that felt like. I stopped that after three stories. But I liked writing them. I've written some reviews, some essays, lots of prose that's been for poets I've worked with in seminars at various times, and some of this prose is some of my favorite prose, and I've written. And lately, to get rid of the obsessive work of REVERSE RAPTURE, regular prose stories.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Over the years there have been several routines and non-routines. The best involve writing everyday, at least something, best of all, writing everyday to complete something on that day. When I wrote REVERSE RAPTUREI wrote 81 lines aday; I'd call that the best writing routine I've ever stumbled into. I think the most important routine might be one combining reading, writing, and living with loved ones, if one is so lucky.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I wish I could answer this question. What do I do, I get up and walk around. I go outside. I pick up a broom. If its really bad I go find a river. I walk around. I wish I could say there is a sure fire way to overcome being stalled. I lie down on the floor and kick my feet a little. I don't know.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

REMNANTS OF HANNAH, it feels short and sweet, after a couple of longer books, I wanted a shorter one, and that's what it is.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, all those things are important, they make life worth living.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

We are lucky we have these others outside of ourselves. There are so many.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I don't know. A lot. Everything.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

A farmer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don't think I can honestly say, I don't think writing has been opposed toanything. I wrote from when I first learned to write, around the age of 4. I know that's preposterous, but it's true. So lucky for me I never had the anxiety of having to make any decisions about this. Doesn't mean I should have never questioned the occupation, vocation, I just didn't.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Finishing a collection of short stories, finishing putting together a selected poems, arranging and editing a prose book of essays. New poems, stories. A trip to Virginia and back up the east coast. A trip to Spain. Thoughts about what to plant now that the season's changing, good friends' and family's futures, what to do next, tomorrow, what's next.

I knew that somehow in the midst of this confusionWas the true dawning of myself.My soul was a man and like a manI would wander forever among the stars and flowers, lonely.My heart a lonely star with no matching starAnywhere in the universe and even soLooking like a man for somewhereTo rest my freedom and resent it.

Lasky’s poems work both the amazement and the breaks; the chasms that exist between situations, moments and people and I am very taken with her use of the straight statement, the twists that come out into single lines. Lasky is a poet of amazing phrases and clear insights in such short, contained bursts, poking through and past what isn’t important, straight into the essence of things.

THE DODO BIRD

Some have describedThe dodo’s beak as actually grotesque.

It was long, pale yellow, and crooked.But what other thing is like that? The sun!

And the sun upon my wingletsHas made me something no other bird or sun can compare.

And in mediating myself upon the birdI have found that I could actually love.

My love, what are you that the dodo isn’t?Economy, the black mark on the sun,

The childless watch over the heavens?Or is the dodo the thing growing from the sun spoke?

You’re, as you are, what I want, even hisblinking neon: [no] indecision

vacancy sign. I have roomfor you and these untrue

I mean disloyalaffections. I’m

a penny. Hardlysomething. One

in a history of immodestwomen: want, wants, wonton, I.

How is it possible for poems to be so easily self-aware without being self-conscious? Or, as she wryly states in the long poem “The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma,” “That sex is an effective way of generating warmth.” Zucker’s poetry works with such a complicated ease, a collage work of words, image and phrases built in sequence and never apart, never separated from the poem and poems that follow.

1 - How did your first book change your life?I don’t know if I let it much, unfortunately. It’s taken me a long time to allow myself to be a writer. But yes, at the risk of sounding essentialist it gave me access to a medium of communication that I really really needed.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?I’ve lived in Toronto too long – I think 36 years or so. Certainly the polvocality of the city has a huge impact on my writing.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?I tend to work in long forms, conceptual sequences.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?They are in the sense that I don’t necessarily wait until a poem is perfectly finished (as if it ever is) until I read it in public. I like trying new work out in a reading, seeing what kind of responses it generates. There is a performative sound element that keeps coming up in my work and those poems are particularly interesting to play with in front of an audience.

And in fact reading can change the way both the reader and I perceive the book. I read from Human Resourcesvery fast, for example, to enact the kind of information overload you experience in the text. but when you actually sit down to read it privately, you have to read it very slowly to tease out its associative strands.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?I don’t think you can separate theory from writing. All my work poses questions, many unanswerable, about knowledge, ethics, mastery, disaster.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?I’ve had mixed experiences with editors, but working with a good editor is definitely a useful process, a gift in fact. Working with an inexperienced editor or one too heavy-handed in attempting to impose their own will can be a real pain.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?I definitely found my most recent book an easier process than previous ones. Hope that trajectory will continue!

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?I think someone like me is supposed to say she prefers peaches.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?Sometimes you have to lie to the lover.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?I’m trying to develop one but things get in the way.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?I try to write in my office but it isn’t heated so I’m spread out on the dining room table waiting for spring.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?Ha, inspiration. I guess you could say I turn to research because most of my writing comes directly from the research I collect.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?Every book is different. My most recent work is this chapbook, Shoot and Weep, and I think there are only three lines in it that come from “me.” This is a definite shift for me that I’m liking.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?Film techniques: montage, assemblage – documentary assemblage in particular – associative research practices, work with documents, found materials, etc.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Write every day. Live by water. Feel good most of the time.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?I’m done attempting other occupations.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?The urge to inscribe.